Converting notes to grace notes

Hi,

I’m pretty new to Dorico and I’m loving it.


However, I’m stuck on a mundane and maddening problem.

I’m notating a bluesy piece which has a bunch of grace notes. I played it in to Dorico and I want to cover some of the notes I played in to grace notes.

However, simply selecting a note and than clicking the Grace Note (/) from the side bar doesn’t work. I need to delete each note and than re-enter it as a grace note.

Is there a faster way to do this? Can’t I convert between a grace note and a normal note?

Thanks!
B.

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You can’t currently convert gracenotes into normal notes or vice-versa. Sorry!

Thanks @pianoleo ,

I guess I will have to re-input the grace notes until an update adds this feature (hopefully).

Happy New Year!
B.

BoWild, when you re-input the notes as grace notes, how do you proceed? Are there not two additional steps in deleting the note and changing the note value of another note first? I wonder, how the software should be able to do these two steps at the same time. It would probobly have to assume, that the missing time will have to be replaced by adding it to the following note?

Hi @k_b ,

Actually, the missing time is an easy fix, since I played the notes in.

Since I played it in to Dorico (live playing), both the grace note and the target note appear as a chord. When I remove the (not-yet) grace note from the chord, there’s no timing issue (no need to adjust note lengths or rests).

But I think this will be the most common scenario (grace notes appearing as a chord together with their target note). As a worst case scenario, it’s easy to adjust the previous note’s length to fill in the space… much easier than re-entering notes.

To replace a note with a grace note, I currently perform the following steps:

  • read the note (so I know what to play).
  • select the note that should have been a grace note (click).
  • delete the note (keyboard).
  • double click on the staff (to add notes) and make sure I’m on the right beat.
  • click the grace note icon.
  • click to set the note value to 1/8.
  • punch in the note.

That’s 5 actions I was hoping to perform in 2 clicks.

I do wish I could simply select the note and than click the grace note icon… I’m pretty sure Dorico could calculate a good-enough default value for the grace-note’s location and length on it’s own (say, half the length of the target note, omitting dots, but no more than 1/8, attached to the current chord or the next note).

Than again, there’s so much to love in Dorico, so I guess I don’t mind the small stuff… I just hope that we all keep getting better :wink:

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Is this feature not yet implemented as of version 2.2.10 if I correctly understand?

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Dear prko,
This feature is not in Dorico yet, and I do not recall anyone from the team writing anything about adding this feature to the software — I asked for this at some point two weeks ago… It probably would help, especially new switchers!

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I would like to chime in and say yes please add this feature! Thanks in advance, team!

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Yes, it would be nice to have this feature.

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Agreed!

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+1

I could really use this feature.

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another +1

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+1 from me also!

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I hope that ‘Paste into current voice’, with both the grace note and insert mode turned on in the left panel, will do this in the future.

I used all kinds of hidden tuples-workarounds to do things like this in Sibelius and I already manually copied lots of these as grace notes in Dorico:

By the way, there are more things to be fixed with grace notes:

  • When deleting the last grace note before the bar line, the bar line is deleted
  • You cannot add dynamics to grace notes with the popover, and you cannot move a dynamic to a grace note with alt + arrow keys. The only way to attach a dynamic to a grace note is by dragging it with the mouse

(And by the way - the trill in my screenshot also has a problem: the playback of the note stops after te trill, so the last half of the note is not played back)
grace.png

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That is not true, but when you delete the last grace note before the bar line, the grace notes move after the barline. I guess the “before barline” property actually belongs to the last note, since you can have some of the grace notes before the barline and some after if necessary (e.g. grace notes representing the turn at the end of a trill, followed by some “real” grace notes).

You cannot add dynamics to grace notes with the popover, and you cannot move a dynamic to a grace note with alt + arrow keys. The only way to attach a dynamic to a grace note is by dragging it with the mouse

Just select a grace note and press D. That works fine for me in version 3.0.10 (IIRC there might have been a problem in version 3.0 if you haven’t upgraded yet).

(And by the way - the trill in my screenshot also has a problem: the playback of the note stops after te trill, so the last half of the note is not played back)

The trill stops at the point where the end of the wavy line is attached, which is presumably at the end of the first tied note. Just drag the wavy line to cover the complete tied note.

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You’re right about the barline and the (shift-)D for grace notes, Rob! I missed that. But you really cannot move a dynamic between grace notes with alt + arrow left and right, you have to use the mouse for that (3.0.10). And my intention with the trill is, that the trill lasts one bar, but the note lasts 2 bars. So I notated the trill line correctly, but the playback of the note stops where the trill ends, instead of lasting the entire 2 bars. Difficult to explain better than this, do you understand? :slight_smile:

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OK, I concede one out of three on grace notes (you can create them with the popover, and therefore dragging is not “the only way” to create them).

If the trlll stops after one bar, why is the second note tied to the trill at all? It’s just a note played on its own. If you don’t want the note after the trill to be articulated, you could use a slur not a tie.

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It is entirely possible to finish the trill before the entire note is finished. Please see Elaine Gould, in the attached picture. There she shows how to tie a trill note to a non-trill note (with a tie, not a slur). Why would Dorico otherwise enable you to make a trill line shorter than the entire duration of the note in the first place?

I hope that my feedback is valuable and thank you Rob for testing and correcting me.

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I agree it would be nice if trill playback could stop part way through a note. In early music there was often no specific notation for this - certainly not wavy lines.

Dorico is primarily a notation program and you can end the notation of a trill line where you want. There are plenty of notations in Dorico that don’t play back yet, for example fermatas. That doesn’t mean Dorico should not let you add fermata signs to the score! Trill lines the stop in the middle of a note are no different IMO.

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Any idea when this will be possible? I’d like to be able to highlight a note and then tap the grace-note button on the left and it turns it into a grace note.

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